I. In some American circles there’s a hubbub about Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, and some Australians are interested. Stephen McAlpine, a pastor in Perth, seems to see the Benedict Option as the standout example of faithful communitarian vision, or maybe as an umbrella term for such. To my mind, the […]
A friend of ours once likened South Sudan to Tanzania. He had visited South Sudan for a construction project, and looming large in his experience was the constant presence of armed men. As he spoke, he seemed to be describing a potential failed state, a hive of barely contained conflict, […]
On arriving in Tanzania in 2013, we were greeted with a new communications reality: mobile internet. Tanzania had started out with mobile internet rather than waiting for wired infrastructure. Unlike Australia, mobile data bundles quickly became cheap and plentiful. By the time of our first home assignment, advanced smartphones were […]
Last time I gave a bit of a description of old paradigm mission. I don’t believe that this old paradigm should be completely done away with. Even if some new paradigm came sweeping in, there would no doubt still be a place for pioneer missionaries from the West, as well […]
I’ve previously talked about a divide I’ve seen in Australia between local mission and global mission, with the result that global mission either gets left off the agenda, or makes an attempted revival in traditional terms. That’s the reason why I was critical of Tim Chester’s new introduction to world […]
An unpublished review written in 2014 for a university ministry website. Here in Tanzania, a pastor friend of mine has a chicken project to empower people in his local church. You get a loan to buy three chickens and you pay it back by selling the eggs. As the chickens […]
Mission Matters: Love Says Go by Tim Chester, Inter-Varsity Press, 2015. All page numbers indicated below are Kindle locations. Tim Chester‘s short new book is a call to world mission. It’s concise and comprehensive — and it may just have been written for the wrong century. The book opens with […]
Meet Jesus at uni 